The Graduation Party That Never Began
South Dakota, 1971. The air was thick with the smell of exhaust and excitement.
Cheryl Miller and Pamela Jackson were just teenagers. High school was over. Life was supposed to be starting.
They climbed into Cheryl’s beige 1960 Studebaker Lark. They were laughing.
They were following a group of boys to a graduation party at a gravel pit.
But the boys took a wrong turn. They doubled back.
When the boys looked in their rearview mirrors… the beige Studebaker was gone.
The road was empty. No dust trails. No taillights.
For days, the police combed the fields. For years, the families waited by the phone.
Nothing.
Rumors started to rot the town from the inside out. Did they run away? Were they taken?
Decades passed. Parents died without knowing the truth.
Then, in 2004, a dark lead emerged. A chilling whisper from a prison cell.
David Lykken, a classmate already in prison for other crimes, became the prime suspect.
Police raided his family farm. They dug up the dirt.
They found a purse. They found bones.
The town held its breath. Was this the house of horrors where Cheryl and Pam met their end?
But the lab results came back. The bones were animal. The purse didn’t belong to the girls.
The investigation collapsed.
The case went cold again. Until a drought in 2013 lowered the water level of a nearby creek…
And a fisherman saw something that didn’t belong in the water.